The vault floor beneath Arthur Vance’s boots didn’t merely tremble. It pitched thirty degrees to the port side with a sickening, load-bearing groan of snapped bedrock.
In the ceiling struts of Sub-Level Minus Two, high-voltage spark channels burst, showering the vinyl floor in cascades of orange sparks. Across the Precursor Archive, the server racks tilted against their anchor bolts, their cooling fans whining in sudden, panicked gaining speed.
Arthur caught the ice-cold transport case in his left arm, bracing his right shoulder against the steel door post of the vault door. Grimm planted his heavy paws, his claws digging deep into the door matting, his single intact ear pinned flat against the sound roar.
“Ground-shaking event!” Toby shouted, grabbing his tactical satchel as he scrambled toward the exit. “Arthur, that wasn’t an ordinary aftershock! The whole mountain is falling!”
Arthur checked the tactical tracking data streaming into his wrist slate.
The digital blueprint of the floating castle was flashing in blinding yellow and crimson alert grids. At the geographic center of the three-mile-wide dark rock massif sat the Citadel’s Primordial Flotation Core. A titanic cluster of ancient anti-gravity crystals embedded in the root bedrock. For decades, the crystal’s delicate ringing floating had been artificially steadied by the complex network of bio-mana tapped from Apostle Nyx’s queen-sac and the circulating amniotic fluids of the vats.
